The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the inventors hereof, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
The present disclosure is directed to methods and apparatus for increasing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) of a received signal in a multi-stream communications system at a low level of computational complexity. In one embodiment, the present disclosure relates to directing a beam towards a receiving device (e.g., beam-forming), and more particularly, to performing beam-forming by efficiently designing a steering matrix.
Traditionally, a transmitting device receives or computes a channel matrix corresponding to noise and interference caused by unintended source signals and equipment noise between the transmitting device and a receiving device. The transmitting device computes a singular value decomposition (SVD) of the channel matrix, and generates a steering matrix to implement beam-forming transmission. Although these mechanisms are effective at increasing SNR and SIR, such mechanisms are computationally inefficient and may prematurely drain batter power, make device miniaturization difficult, and/or increase the cost or size of the transmitting device.